PBS News Weekend helped their brethren at NPR promote a podcast series on Sunday in a segment headlined "How online misinformation is ‘supercharging’ conspiracy theories." Podcaster Zach Mack made a three-part podcast on how his conservative Christian father has gone down a "rabbit hole" of conspiracy thinking, causing a deep rift in his family. One might imagine doing a podcast on Dad losing his marbles isn't going to heal the rift.
For a segment on "online misinformation," it's not very specific. We get this snippet of shards of conspiracies:
DAD: They're going to shut us down because of this EMP [electro-magnetic pulse]. All the supply lines are going to be disrupted. So there will be a one-world government with a one-world currency. I think the Biden has probably three or four maybe more body doubles. Obama will be found guilty of treason.
Now imagine if "Trump will be found guilty of treason" was a sign of conspiracy nonsense. You don't have to believe in these conspiracies to smell where PBS and NPR are coming from. Take more of a listen here, and you hear that "Obama will be found guilty of treason" is one of Dad's list of ten wild predictions for 2024, none of which came true. They left that list out of the PBS segment.
They left Dad's belief in God and Mack's sister coming out as gay out of the segment as well. Mack said it began with disbelief in vaccines and in health authorities, and has grown worse:
MACK: He's sort of the lone Christian conservative in our household. My mother is like a very liberal Jewish woman. We grew up in the Bay Area, so it's a pretty liberal place. My sister and myself sort of fall along the lines. We're much more like, left-leaning in our beliefs.
So he's always been a little bit of the odd man out. And now that he's become increasingly interested in conspiracies, he's like really sort of isolated himself.
They blamed the growth in intensity on the Covid pandemic, which since it brought oppressive lockdowns recommended by public-health experts, clearly enhanced the notion of more drastic government action. The fact that some of their scientific findings now look misguided -- from mask guidance and six-foot separations to shutting down schools for years -- isn't supposed to be a counterpoint. This exchange between Zach and his dad is a classic:
DAD: It's called denying us freedom of speech.
ZACH: It's misinformation.
DAD: No. Who gets the right to label it misinformation?
This came when Dad was upset at YouTube censoring some of his conspiracy content.
The other guest was David Robert Grimes, author of a book called Good Thinking -- which in England was titled The Irrational Ape. One Amazon reviewer of the book argued: "he is unapologetic about using examples that make out religious people and politically conservative people to be total idiots." That would explain why PBS found him to be worthy of their platform.
Grimes reasonably blamed group chats on the internet: "I can find communities of people that not only validate my belief, they will amplify it. At times when things are uncertain or people are afraid, conspiracy theories, they proliferate more wildly. And the pandemic was the first thing, the first pandemic we'd ever had during the age of instant communication. And I think we're still feeling the reverberations of that five years on."
As you would expect from PBS or NPR, they project that only the right-wingers and the crazy Christians delve into conspiracy theories. There's somehow none of this on the left -- even anti-vaxxers on the left. No one will focus on how post-George Floyd riots that led to deaths may have started on amplified internet chats in the BLM bubbles. "Public" broadcasting welcomed those riots as a "reckoning."
